Scalpel

Scalpel; precision tone-sculpting drive unit.

Is it called Scalpel because it sounds sharp and ice-picky and piercing? No, but it can do that if you hate your bandmates. Or if that's your thing.

Scalpel is a one-off commission that was too good not to share (shout out to René). We were approached with the request for a pedal with enough searing top-end to strip the enamel off your teeth at 50 paces. Thing is though, that kind of thing can be a bit subjective...so we refined things a bit - made a prototype that could do the angular Post-Punk/New Wave thing. Great for shards of chords and spidery leads. But to make sure we weren't missing the mark, we incorporated an active (i.e. it can cut or boost) 3 band tone stack. So now we're potentially able to explore other territory; scooped mids? nasal, pushed-mids? hefty low end or muddy, totally rolled off treble? All that and more are in there

So that's the frequency shaping stuff sorted, the next thing on the checklist was dynamics. There needed to be lots on tap - wind back your guitar volume to clean up, dig in hard to make in snarl - all of that stuff. Here we introduced the Body control, a high-pass filter at the front of the drive circuit. Less low end doesn't immediately translate as less perceived bass (you can recover lows with the tone stack anyway) but reduces energy from the guitar to be overdriven. So, with Body at full tilt all of the available energy hits the drive section and with the Drive control up a decent way, you're nearing heavy saturated distortion territory. Experimenting with the balance of these two is crucial to getting the most from Scalpel and achieving that sound in your head.

One more thing though, we're always on about versatility with our designs. Scalpel is completely clean with the drive down when using the majority of guitars/pickups. You can use the tone stack to add a bit of sparkle or correct a bit of honking mid or whatever - it's essentially an EQ pedal until you start to push it. Which is handy.So have a look and listen to the demo video below, it covers some, but by no means all, of what Scalpel offers

160 GBP

Your pedal will be shipped up to 7 days after ordering (To allow us time to build it for you!)